Officials from Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement have started to flee the capital, Kabul, amid growing fears of US attacks, according to witnesses.
Taliban officials and their families were seen heading out of the city for the countryside, but it was not clear if this was under instruction from their spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, they said.
Those fleeing appeared mainly to be junior commanders and officials. The majority of the leadership is based in the southern city of Kandahar. Witnesses said hundreds of residents of the capital were also trying to escape.
Fear of reprisal has triggered a rush to get families out of the cities. Thousands of people have flooded over the eastern border to the already-overflowing refugee camps of Pakistan.
These who couldn't leave were bracing for war, stocking up on food as prices soared and the Afghani currency slid.
With Iran announcing it was sealing its eastern border with Afghanistan, opposition fighters controlling a narrow northern corridor and Pakistan pledging to support US anti-terrorism efforts, Kabul residents were feeling increasingly vulnerable.
The spiritual leader of the Taliban movement yesterday called an urgent meeting of senior Islamic clerics to discuss the defence of his isolated nation and he appealed to Muslim nations for help.
The Taliban insist neither they nor bin Laden had the capacity to organise an international plot that saw trained pilots hijack large passenger jets and crash them into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.